Midnight Moonrising (Moonrising #2)(36)

I didn't realize I was smiling until laughter bubbled up my throat. Now, I couldn't get the man to leave me alone. My, how things change, I thought, and stopped in front of the first door on the left.

Drawing in a shaky breath, I lifted my knuckles to the wood door and tapped lightly. "Lea? It's Mena. May I come in?"

The sound of sniffling and a nose being blown reached my ears and my happy memory balloon burst.

This was not going to be good.

"Is it only you?" Lea said, and her voice sounded rough and thick from crying.

"It's just me."

"You can come in."

My hand found the cool brass handle, and I let myself into Jaxon's chamber.





V''''V





Alex





Alex stood under the spray of the shower head and let the hot water cascade over his shoulders and back.

He knew he had things to worry about, and possibly even other things that needed his attention, but the only thing he could think about since Mena had kissed him was that Mena had kissed him.

Even as the bad feeling in his gut warned him that the kiss could lead absolutely nowhere except a prison cell or a shallow grave, he closed his eyes and continued to think about how good her soft lips had felt on his.

It was more than he'd ever dreamed would happen between them, and yet he still had hope there would be more kissing, more touching and more of her in his future.

He remembered everything about it: the moment of contact, his stunned disbelief that it had actually happened, and then he had kissed her back with everything he had in him to give her.

If she was just playing with him, he couldn't see it. Her eyes had been glazed and full of desire when he'd taken that step back, letting go of her before he stepped over any invisible boundaries.


She'd made the first move and he was happy about that. He didn't want to let that bother him, but it was. God, help him, it was! It was too soon. Marc had barely been in the ground thirty-six hours. Sure, it was true the guy had been a piece of shit and cheated on her and hit her. She had done the right thing by leaving him for it, but the public didn't know about any of that. Mena had no intentions of telling them, either.

Doubt about her true feelings crept into the darkest part of his mind and turned a light on.

"Damn it!" he swore as he slapped the shower wall.

He couldn't help her. Standing outside the box and looking in, he saw himself as a fool who had been played. She didn't want him. She somehow knew that he liked her, and she used that to get him to help her.

"You are pathetic, Rhodes," he muttered as he cut the shower off. "Rich, beautiful, intelligent women don't fall in love with cops," he growled through his teeth as he stepped out of the shower, grabbing a towel from the rack and wrapping it around his waist as he headed toward his bedroom.

Someone knocked on the door, stopping him just before he made it to the folded clothes on his bed. He poked his head back out the bedroom door and stared down the hall at the front door for a moment before glancing back at the alarm clock on his bedside table: 1:28 a.m.

His eyes narrowed to slits, but he grabbed his extra handgun from the drawer of the nightstand and walked slowly to the front of the apartment.

It wasn't a long trip. It wasn't like he needed a lot of space to live in. And then there was the whole thing about him not even being home most of the time. His damn job was going to be the death of him. That was if the damn woman who had kissed him earlier didn't do it first.

He stepped to the side of the door and pressed his back against the wall beside it. "Who is it?"

"Open the door, Cop," a familiar voice said.

He raked his memory to place voice with face, but came up empty; somehow he had managed to overload his brain this week.

"Identify yourself!" Alex demanded.

Another guy chuckled as the one who had first spoken mumbled something, so there were at least two of them. Alex's eyes moved to the counter where his other gun was and thought about grabbing it just in case.

"It's Roel, Brad and Heath, Cop. You gonna put that Smith and Wesson down and let us in or would you like to get dressed and meet us at the Awful Waffle? We're hungry as hell."

Alex's wide eyes moved from the door to the piece in his hand. How the hell did Roel know what kind of gun he kept in his bedside drawer? More to the point, how the hell did he know that he wasn't dressed? A chill ran up his spine and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as paranoia crept its way into his brain.

"What do you want? You do realize it's after one-thirty in the morning, right?"

One of them chuckled, but either Heath or Brad answered; he couldn't remember which was which. "Yeah, about that, you might wanna change your sleeping schedule around. We do a lot of what we do during the night. It's lunch for us, man. You hungry or what?"

Alex blinked a few times, trying to remember the last time he had eaten anything. It had been a few hours before seeing Mena with Katie at that corner café and the eats had only been a granola bar and a protein shake.

His stomach growled as if it knew there were people outside the door offering to feed it. "Traitor," Alex whispered, and threw the locks on the door, opening it wide.

He kept his gun in full view, but none of the three seemed to be bothered by it or even acted like they thought he would use it if they decided to attack him. Then Alex remembered the way Roel had pushed him back down in the swing at Mena's and he stepped out of the way so they could come in his home.